I can't believe there's been no love for The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

and
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

Thanks, it's by far my most successful thread! I've wanted to do it for a while, just never got around to it. I am really glad so many people are enjoying it, and there's been such a great variety of work mentioned.

As someone who has struggled with depression throughout much of my adult life, the poem 'Richard Cory' has always resonated strongly.

One of my favourites. A stunner.

More Frost from me. His simplicity is so deceptive, so perfect.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

And:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

I'm not a big fan of Frost, but I love this one! Something about the rhythm.

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

==========================

And another ee one

honour corruption villainy holiness
riding in fragrance of sunlight(side by side
all in a singing wonder of blossoming yes
riding)to him who died that death should be dead
humblest and proudest eagerly wandering

(equally all alive in miraculous day)
merrily moving through sweet forgiveness of spring
(over the under the gift of the earth of the sky
knight and ploughman pardoner wife and nun
merchant frere clerk somnour miller and reve

and geoffrey and all)come up from the never of when
come into the now of forever come riding alive
down while crylessly drifting through vast most
nothing’s own nothing children go of dust

Sternvogel: I find this choice very interesting, because I'm a person who can be very happy with small things and everyday joys. Do you think, as Browning seems to impliy, that there is something offputting about this quality? Or is it just that the lady in question lacked a sense of perspective or proportion?

My reading (influenced by the professor in whose class I first encountered the poem) is that the "last duchess" was one of those people whose obituaries feature such lines as "she treated everybody with the same courtesy, whether the CEO or the janitor." The duke, meanwhile, is so pompous that he figures his "favor at her breast" should outweigh anything from the "bough of cherries some officious fool/ Broke in the orchard for her" to the beauty of a sunset.

While the actions of those you love should be seen as special, the duke's marriages have not been romantic, but motivated by money and status. It's no accident that the narrator's parting words refer to an object -- the man has already mentally "moved on" from his last duchess as he focuses on flaunting, and adding to, his wealth.

Really, the whole poem as a unit, but since I can't quote whole works, here's a sample:

Code:

Haul them off! Hide them!
The heart winces
For junk and gimcrack,
for jerrybuilt things
And the men who make them
for a little money,
Bartering pride
like the bought boxer
Who pulls his punches,
or the paid-off jockey
Who in the home stretch
holds in his horse.
Yet the things themselves
in thoughtless honor
Have kept composure,
like captives who would not
Talk under torture.

Someone else mentioned the old Anglo-Saxon strong-stress rhythm and alliteration, this is a wonderful example.

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.

I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

Look at the key transition:

Quote:

What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush:

The line break is perfect (helped by the capitalization of "Soared") for conveying the rising sound of the shot and the simultaneous release of spirit of the bird.

Gerard Manley Hopkins has been mentioned. He is a guilty pleasure of mine -- I'd disagree with his theology, and yes, he can be "quaint" and sentimental, but I love his total abandon when using language. Or, more precisely, the way his carefully-controlled language gives way, when he reaches a crescendo, to his love of sound and rhythm. He makes up words and phrases and practically babbles and it's so, so good.

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

...and how's this for a description of a soaring raptor's flight (read it fast for best effect):

Quote:

...in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

Hopkins also wrote a wonderfully world-weary passage in God's Grandeur...but again, the flow of the language is just so...well, look:

Quote:

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

It's about the meaning of words, and he takes a word, and by telling you a story, gives that word new layers of meaning.

.

Quote:

..Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence...

Sharon Olds. I love a lot of her work...except for the extensive "I hated my father" series of poems, that is. But with everything else she's so good, so direct...she "goes there" instead of tiptoeing around the truth. She's unafraid to look at things we'd rather not. An example:

...It is over, they are
dead, then, curled in the box with its
scarlet velvet lining on a bed of
sunflower seeds for the other side,
and where is she? And the love she poured into them,
where is it, now? Dead? She turns and
walks to the house, her heart cold and
hard in her chest as a bulb in the winter ground.

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer
Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
-- William Butler Yeats, "Among School Children"

Beyond a mortal man impassioned far
At these voluptuous accents, he arose
Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star
Seen 'mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose;
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blended its odor with the violet, --
Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows
Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet
Against the window panes; St. Agnes moon hath set.
-- John Keats, "The Eve of Saint Agnes"
BEST FUCK STANZA IN POETRY FORM

As someone who has struggled with depression throughout much of my adult life, the poem 'Richard Cory' has always resonated strongly.

Your lordship, your depression is deserved :

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

John Gillespie Magee, Jr

This was my Dad's favorite, we had it read at his funeral in June. I love it too.

Everyone should be born into this world happy and loving everything,
Bu in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Hallelujah, anyway I'm not where I started!

...The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
A perfect Woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a Spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light.

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon’s roar;—
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more!

Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor’s tread,
Or know the conquered knee;—
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!

O, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every thread-bare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,—
The lightning and the gale!

I find The Layers by Stanley Kunitz always strangely moving and inspiring. The images lose something out of context so here's the whole thing:

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.

When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods ...
But there is no road through the woods.

One for "interesting times", by Thomas Hardy:

I
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.

II
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

III
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.

One for passion, by John Donne:

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

And for reflection, this brief quotation from TS Eliot's Little Gidding:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

When I was about 11, I was going to a theatre-arts day camp, and one of my classes was Oral Interpretation. I had to memorize "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold. It's not my favorite poem, but after 60 years, I still have it memorized.

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

This was my grandmother's favorite poem; she learned it as a child and could recite the entire thing for all her life.

To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature’s teachings, while from all around—
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—
Comes a still voice—

Kipling's "If" is high up there on my list...but "The Sergeant's Weddin'" will always be my favorite:

'E was warned agin' 'er --
That's what made 'im look;
She was warned agin' 'im --
That is why she took.
'Wouldn't 'ear no reason,
'Went an' done it blind;
We know all about 'em,
They've got all to find!

Cheer for the Sergeant's weddin' --
Give 'em one cheer more!
Grey gun-'orses in the lando,
An' a rogue is married to a whore!

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before

In 7th grade we had to choose a poem to memorize and recite. I chose "The Raven" by Poe. Daunting, and I stumbled a bit, but did it. Every twist and turn of thought is explored as he works his way down into madness.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chaucer's Prologue

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour

I also heard a recording of this in 7th grade. Such fun to imagine the language then. When we met, it was something my wife and I had in common.

Quote:

Originally Posted by H.P.Lovecraft

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die

The wind was a torrent of darkness
As it poured through the gusty trees
The Moon was a ghostly galleon
Tossed upon cloudy seas
The road was a ribbon of moonlight
Over the purple moor
And a highwayman came riding
Riding, riding
Up to the old inn door

Wallace Stevens' eloquent observation that the possibility of loss is what makes things valuable:

Quote:

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

The wind was a torrent of darkness
As it poured through the gusty trees
The Moon was a ghostly galleon
Tossed upon cloudy seas
The road was a ribbon of moonlight
Over the purple moor
And a highwayman came riding
Riding, riding
Up to the old inn door

Alfred Noyes

Man, that is really well done, intense and foreboding.

I really do enjoy that this thread has been a mix of classics and lesser known pieces. The formality of the classics seems to drive so many people away from poetry, and this thread has proven that formal language and structure is not necessary to touch the souls of the reader.

I really do enjoy that this thread has been a mix of classics and lesser known pieces. The formality of the classics seems to drive so many people away from poetry, and this thread has proven that formal language and structure is not necessary to touch the souls of the reader.

But perhaps also that form/structure *can* touch the soul? Just have to stick up for formal poetry one more time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bricker

Wallace Stevens' eloquent observation that the possibility of loss is what makes things valuable:

Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste,
I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday;
I dare not move my dim eyes any way,
Despair behind, and death before doth cast
Such terror, and my feebled flesh doth waste
By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh. Only thou art above, and when towards thee
By thy leave I can look, I rise again;
But our old subtle foe so tempteth me,
That not one hour I can myself sustain;
Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art,
And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart.

My father grew up in the 1920s and was required to memorize lots of poetry. Over 60 years later he could still recite many of his favorites including "Casabianca" by Felicia Hemans
The Boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
Shone round him o'er the dead.

And Longfellow's Evangeline:
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of old, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

One he really loved was Christina Rossetti's "The Wind"; I heard him recite it many times and love it too.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.

One of my mother's favorites which I share with her is Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Three of my favorite poems are luminous ones reflecting on mortality, immortality and infinity

Here's a favorite verse from William Blake

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day
by Delmore Schwartz

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn ...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn ...)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(... that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

"The Truly Great", Stephen Spender

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap.
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Tommy, 'ow's yer soul? "
But it's " Thin red line of 'eroes " when the drums begin to roll

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

My father grew up in the 1920s and was required to memorize lots of poetry. Over 60 years later he could still recite many of his favorites including "Casabianca" by Felicia Hemans
The Boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
Shone round him o'er the dead. . . .

Or, as it is often rendered:

The boy stood on the burning deck
Eating peanuts by the peck
I don't care, he loudly boasted
Because I like my peanuts roasted.

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door—
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Pallas, being one of the second generation of Titans in Greek mythology. For the Raven to perch on the bust of Pallas is to treat it and all human affairs with complete disinterest. They are of no consequence. There was simply no room in the Raven's agenda for such silliness.

ST's vBulletin 3 Responsive Styles

Our newly refreshed styles in 2017, brings the old vb3 to the new level, responsive and modern feel. It comes with 3 colors with or without sidebar, fixed sized or fluid. Default vbulletin 3 style made responsive also available in the pack.
Purchase Our Style Pack Now